Monitoring Electricity Usage

“First, you have to understand the problem.” – George Pólya

We do use quite a bit of electricity. It’s a very clean business in other respects, we use little paper, the staff are mostly local and we do reuse and recycle as much as we can. However, power is something we need, and plenty of it.

However, as a good corporate citizen we decided we really need to see if we can reduce our footprint.

To work out where our power was going, and how much we’re using we needed a way of monitoring it and displaying it to staff.

We bought a CurrentCost Envi and hooked it up to our incoming power feed. I then wrote a small program to capture that data and store it in our database server. I created a simple page using Google Charting on our system so our operators can see exactly how much energy we’re using:

Click the image for a full screen version!

Our staff can see a live updated power reading that changes every 12 seconds (AJAX magic), they can see a graph over the last hour, an hour by hour breakdown of the last 24 hours, and then a day by day comparison.

You can see the power usage going up at the last third of that graph. That was 8.30 and a department of JAM had just started to come into the building.

We hope that with some better monitoring, some education and some self policing by staff we can dramatically lower our energy consumption.

As soon as we made the graph available to staff last night, one of our operators went around the building switching off lights that had been left on. She could easily see on the graph (below) the savings she’d made:

Once we’ve gathered some baseline data, we’ll start to make some changes to our systems and document them on here.